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The Washington Post just conducted a public
opinion poll to find out what are the top "worries" of
Americans. The results are informative and useful to
policymakers, officeholders, candidates, and the media.

Topping the list of worries in the Washington Post
survey, identified by a whopping 62 percent of
respondents, was this: "The American educational
system will get worse instead of better." Although this
worry outranked crime, drugs, taxes, health care and
welfare, it is seldom if ever addressed by our national
political leadership or media elite. Ask yourself how
many times you have ever seen this subject featured on
the nightly television news programs of NBC, CBS,
ABC, CNN, or PBS. Many subjects on which television
news programs lavish most of their high-priced minutes,
such as Saddam Hussein's latest outrage, didn't even
rate a mention in the survey as a worry.

The American people recognize what the Federal
Government, the education establishment and the media
have failed to notice: that public schools are a disaster
area and that so-called "reforms" and the influx of more
and more taxpayers' money aren't doing any good. If
the pollsters would question people further, here are
some of the specifics they would find that Americans
are worried about.

Violent crime against students and teachers inside
the public schools has caused an unprecedented level of
fear and intimidation. A USA Today survey found that
43 percent of public school students avoid the school
restrooms because of fear. School administrators are
afraid to take any disciplinary action against criminal or
gun-toting students. Governor George Allen of Virginia
reported that the U.S. Department of Education
threatened to withhold $50 million in special ed funds if
Virginia continues to discipline criminal students.

The chief reasons why the educational system is so
inferior and is getting worse is the refusal to teach basic
skills and knowledge in the elementary grades and the
dumbing down of the textbooks and courses of study by
about three years below what it was a generation ago.

The goal of the schools now is to inculcate self-esteem in schoolchildren instead of to give them the
skills necessary for individual achievement. The
schools have been pumping up kids with inflated
notions of their self-worth and importance, eliminating
the discipline of competition, insulating them from
failure, and shielding them from the knowledge that
poor performance can be remedied by hard work and
perseverance.

The schools have reduced the time spent on
academic subjects to about one-fourth of the school
day. The majority of the day is spent on psychological
courses, counseling, social services, and other non-academic activities. Even worse, these non-academic
courses use a methodology that used to be called values
clarification and is now known by its generic name of
non-directive. That means that schoolchildren are
presented with dilemmas, situations, and various
problems of modern living, but given no direction as to
the correct or expected behavior.

Schools have abandoned their responsibility to
correct students' mistakes, all the way from
encouraging "inventive spelling" in the elementary
grades to "make your own choices about sex and drugs"
in high school. A call to respect "family values" is
meaningless to a generation that has been systematically taught that everyone can choose his own values,
and that one person's values are as good as the next
person's.

While the American people have accurately
identified the problem that public schools aren't doing
their job and are getting worse, they haven't figured out
whom to blame. It's a fraud when presidential or
congressional candidates promise to remedy the
problem, because education is a state and local (not a
federal) problem and only six percent of public school
funding comes from the federal government.

The only action that federal officeholders should
take is to stop imposing national mandates that override
local authorities and parents' rights. Yet, most
proposed congressional legislation is still moving
toward more federal, rather than local, control.

President Clinton's offer to spend $2.75 billion to
send volunteers into the schools to teach illiterate third
graders how to read is a four-dimensional sham.
Teaching kids to read is not a federal responsibility, the
teachers union won't allow volunteers into the
classroom, the children ought to be taught how to read
in the first (not third) grade, and the schools are still
refusing to use the only proven method of producing
good readers: intensive, systematic phonics.

The Washington Post survey is an important
contribution to public discussion and policy
development. It should be used by politicians and the
media to address the American people's number-one
worry. And those who want to know why public
schools are such a disaster, both academically and
morally, should watch Eagle Forum's new television
documentary, Crisis in the Classroom.

The alarming rise in illegal drug use by teenagers is
big news. Although drug use by adults has leveled off
and is actually down since 1985, drug use (mostly in
marijuana) among teens aged 12 to 17 is increasing
every year, doubling since 1992 to eleven percent in
1995.

Marijuana damages the memory, energy and general
learning power of children. Children who start out on
marijuana are 17 times more likely to progress to hard
drugs than if they had never used marijuana.

The drug experts call this "very scary." Their
explanations include neglect by parents, the misleading
messages from political leaders, the glamorization of
drugs by the entertainment industry, the failure of the
media to cover the issue, and denial of the problem.

There is another reason they are overlooking: the
failure of drug education in the schools. So-called drug
education may even be counterproductive. On a youth
roundtable on drugs on the Lehrer NewsHour on
September 25, one teen offered his explanation that
drug courses in school actually cause experimentation
with illegal drugs.

Congress has poured billions (not just millions) of
taxpayers' dollars into drug education in public schools.
In 1991, Congress's watchdog agency, the General
Accounting Office (GAO) reported to the Senate on the
$1.1 billion that had been spent on drug education up to
that date. The cover of the report summed up the result:
"Impact Unknown."

The GAO report listed 21 classroom drug curricula
commonly used in public schools. They typically
presented students with a lot of "nonjudgmental
information" combined with a process of "decision
making" that urged students to consider the
"alternatives." A couple of courses vaguely described
"refusal skills," but not a single course was based on a
"just say no" approach, or stated that illegal drugs are
wrong, or warned students that they must not consider
the "alternative" of using illegal drugs. The courses
did not comply with the Drug-Free Schools and
Communities Act which requires all public schools to
teach that "the use of illicit drugs and the unlawful
possession and use of alcohol is wrong."

Teaching students that anything is "wrong" is so
anathema to public school curriculum writers that they
simply ignore the law's mandate. Under prevailing
public school methodology, all teaching (especially
about sex and drugs) is "non-directive." For example,
the GAO report described a drug education course
called "Me-ology." It called for sixth grade students to
spend 17 hours of class time "choosing actions that
conform to personal beliefs after considering
alternative choices." The course did not teach that it
would be wrong to choose cocaine as the "alternative"
that conforms to their personal beliefs.

The GAO descriptions of the 21 drug curricula
show that most of the courses spend most of their class
time playing psychological games under the rubric of
"enhancing students' self-awareness and self-esteem."
The education theorists have convinced themselves that
drug abuse is caused by students' lack of self-esteem.

Subsequent investigations of drug education
courses have produced similar disappointing results.
Dr. Richard Clayton, director of the Center for
Prevention Research at the University of Kentucky in
Lexington, told the New York Times on September 18
that the popular course called DARE (Drug Abuse
Resistance Education) "has been evaluated in a
reasonably rigorous way by five to ten different
researchers in different parts of the country," but
researchers "failed to find lasting effects."

In 1995, the Michigan State Senate exposed a giant
scandal in the use of federal anti-drug funds by the
Michigan State Department of Education. The
bureaucrats had illegally diverted more than $50
million of federal anti-drug funds into pressuring local
school districts to adopt the bureaucrats' pet project:
a controversial health, sex and psychological
curriculum called the "Michigan Model."

Some diverted funds were spent on an organized
campaign to discredit and intimidate parents by
keeping files on parents, making photos and videos of
them, training coordinators how to "handle" parents,
having a computer bulletin board to exchange
information on parents, labeling them with epithets,
and inviting People for the American Way to assist in
the anti-parent campaign.

Meanwhile, Michigan Drug Control Director,
Robert Peterson, was reporting alarmingly high drug-use rates among Michigan youth. Maybe the teenagers
wouldn't have fared any better if the money had been
spent on non-directive drug education (instead of sex
and psychology), but the illegal diversion of funds
shows that the educators just weren't interested in
addressing the increased use of drugs by teenagers, even
when they were given plenty of funds to deal with the
problem.

According to the GAO report cited above, federal
drug education funds were also diverted to
psychological and attitudinal "touchy-feely" courses in
Los Angeles and Cleveland. Nancy Reagan's "just say
no" campaign never made it into the classroom.

The scandal of what is called drug education is ripe
for a thorough Congressional investigation. Exposing
the misuse of the funds already spent will not only help
us to tackle increased drug use by teenagers, but it will
go a long way toward showing parents that the public
schools have taught children it's okay to make their
own behavioral choices without regard to standards of
right and wrong.

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The 104th Congress's record on education was
mixed. The House tried to zero out Goals 2000, but the
Senate put the money back in. The House tried to stop
the flow of wasted drug education money, but Congress
acquiesced in Bill Clinton's tantrum and restored it.

The good news about the 104th Congress was that
it did not pass the conference report on the
controversial bill called the CAREERS bill (H.R.1617)
or its Senate companion, the Workforce Development
bill (S.143). This was a remarkable achievement, since
H.R.1617 passed the House in September 1995 by a
vote of 345 to 79, and S.143 passed the Senate in
October 1996 by 95 to 2. This massive legislation
would have expanded and institutionalized the federal
mandates contained in the Goals 2000 Act and the
School-to-Work Act, both passed in 1994 and signed by
President Clinton.

These bills were designed to implement the plan
laid out in an 18-page letter written by Marc Tucker to
Hillary Clinton on November 11, 1992, to use
schoolchildren as "human resources for the global labor
market." It is clear from the writings of Marc Tucker,
Ira Magaziner, Hillary Clinton, Robert Reich, and the
legislative history of H.R.1617 and S.143 that the goal
is to transform public school curricula into specific
workforce tracks determined by unelected local
workforce development boards. The proper name for
this is National Economic Planning, a.k.a. Socialism, a
system that has failed all over the world.

Speaker Newt Gingrich was sent a letter signed by
63 Republican members of the Missouri House
objecting to the way that H.R.1617 "centralizes
unprecedented powers at the federal level," "supersedes
state laws," and "amends out the state legislature,
replacing it with the Governor." The letter asserted
that "this practice of avoiding the Legislature is
unacceptable and flies in the face of the principle of
local control of education."

A letter signed by 14 California State Senators
called on Congress to "kill" H.R.1617. Among the
many reasons cited were the extraordinary powers
given to Governors and the setting up of a National
Electronic Data Base.

S.143 was largely written by a staffer for Senator
Ted Kennedy, the late Steve Spinner, who worked on
it for three years. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, both
Kennedy and Senator Nancy Kassebaum paid tribute to
Spinner as the principal author of the bill and of the
whole concept of using the public schools to carry out
"workforce education and employment functions" and
turn schools into "a comprehensive one-stop delivery
system." The Congress should be thanked for not
passing these bills.

The bad news about the 104th Congress is that it
failed to pass the Family Privacy Protection Act.
Designed to protect pupil and family privacy, the bill
was straightforward in stating that schools may not,
without prior written parental consent, ask minors to
answer questionnaires about political affiliations or
beliefs, mental or psychological problems, sexual
behavior or attitudes, illegal or self-incriminating
behavior, appraisals of other family members, or
religious affiliations or beliefs.

This bill was noncontroversial when it sailed
through the House in 1995 by 417 to 7. In May 1996,
the school establishment went into panic when it
discovered that it was pending in the Senate and, if
passed, might interfere with plans to build files of
personal information on public school pupils and their
families. The New York Times devoted a whole page
to phony alarms about this bill on May 19, 1996.

This bill was eminently reasonable because schools
have no business eliciting personal or family
information from students. But we now live in an era
when schools even assert their right, without parental
knowledge or consent, to pass out condoms and to
force little girls to undress and undergo intrusive
genital examinations.

The hysteria of the school establishment against
this bill was encapsuled in the lead sentence in the New
York Times news article: "Research into illegal drug
use by American adolescents could be stifled by
legislation pending in Congress." This was followed
by quotations from several Ph.D.s ominously
predicting that the bill "will leave us conducting the
war on drugs largely in the dark."

One of these Ph.D.s who was crying around about
how the law would "cripple" his surveys of
schoolchildren, said sarcastically, "We also couldn't
find out whether they believe in God, which some
people think is important." However, schools should
not be allowed to ask public schoolchildren whether or
not they believe in God! (Where is the ACLU when we
need it?)

The widespread use of intrusive surveys and
questionnaires in the public school classroom started in
the mid-1970s and resulted in the passage of the first
Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment in 1978,
sponsored by former university president and Senator
Sam Hayakawa. The public school establishment was
powerful enough to prevent regulations from being
written until President Ronald Reagan ordered them
issued in 1984. National Education Association agents
in the Department of Education and public school
administrators nationwide then circled the wagons
against this law. Despite egregious violations, it has
never been enforced.

Take, for example, the infamous 149-question
survey which has been given, despite parental
objections, to nearly all 6th, 9th and 12th grade
Minnesota pupils. Parents were up in arms about it, not
only because it was privacy-invading, but also because
it assumed that illegal drug use, promiscuity, and
suicidal tendencies are normal teenage behavior.

Another serious objection was that it encouraged
pupils to inform on their parents. That sort of
interrogation of children should not be tolerated in a
free society. Here's a typical question: "Has drinking
by any family member repeatedly caused family, health,
job or legal problems? If yes, who? (Mark all that
apply.) Parent who lives with me, Parent who doesn't
live with me, Brother or sister, Other relative, Other
person who lives with me."

Many questions conveyed the notion that the
majority of teenagers are using illegal drugs. "If you
use marijuana, how old were you when you started? If
you use any other drug, how old were you when you
started? How often do you get drunk?" Some
questions interrogated the child about his religion.
"How often do you attend religious services?" "How
important is religion in your life?"

Some questions would be downright traumatic for
some children. "Have you ever tried to kill yourself?"
"How often have you run away from home?" "Have
you felt so discouraged or hopeless that you wondered
if anything was worthwhile?" Of course, the survey
also included Peeping Tom sex questions. "Have you
ever had sexual intercourse (gone all the way)? If you
have sexual intercourse, how often do you and/or your
partner use any birth control method? Have you been
pregnant?"

The public schools have no business requiring
children to answer any of these nosy questions without
prior written parental consent. To assert that restricting
these surveys will hamper our "war on drugs" is
ridiculous.

An estimated two million children (three times as
many boys as girls, and four times as many as in 1990)
have been labeled with Attention Deficit Disorder
(ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
(ADHD). The most widely used drug to treat this
condition is methylphenidate, known as Ritalin. A
powerful stimulant, it juices up the central nervous
system, takes effect in 30 minutes, and peters out in
three to four hours. Ritalin is classified as a Schedule
II controlled substance in the same category as cocaine,
methadone and methamphetamine.

In 1994, the U.S. Department of Education, Office
of Special Education Programs, under contract
HS92017001, gave the Chesapeake Institute of
Washington, D.C. the funding to produce two slick
videos: "Facing the Challenges of ADD" featuring
actress Rita Moreno, and "One Child in Every
Classroom" with Frank Sesno as moderator. Parts of
the videos sound like an infomercial for Ritalin.

In a PBS documentary following eight months of
investigation, a Department of Education spokesman
was asked if he was aware that the parents who spoke
so enthusiastically about Ritalin on the videos were
board members of Children and Adults with Attention
Deficit Disorder (CHADD), and if he knew that
CHADD has received cash grants of $900,000 plus in-kind services from Ciba-Geigy, the manufacturer of
Ritalin. Obviously embarrassed, the bureaucrat denied
such knowledge. It's clear that the Department of
Education does not adhere to professional standards of
disclosure.

Parents of a child who is diagnosed, labeled, or
treated by school-paid personnel would be well-advised to seek an independent, unbiased medical opinion.

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